It’s Monday again and as usual, I’ll be putting my thoughts out there on a specific topic. As you can tell from the title I’m going to attempt to highlight a few reasons why you should teach your clients the importance of quality original copy. First, let me give a little background on the normal situation at least in my experience. A client comes in and says I want a website and oh yeah it needs to show up first on search engines like Google for example. Usual story, right? So, you request the content they have and it’s either one paragraph on whatever it is that they do and maybe just maybe they have a bullet point list of the services they provide. If I, in turn, tell them to describe their services in detail they come back to me with a description but if I run it, I will undoubtedly find that the same description is available on a site or sites usually in the first 5-10 sites that are on the top of Google Search for that same industry or service.  My point is that clients don’t understand that there are hundreds of factors that influence if your site ranks on Google. That’s not the scope of my article today but I found a cool article related to ranking factors you can find at https://backlinko.com/google-ranking-factors Back to my point copying content will not help you rank no matter what you think. That’s why you need to educate clients on the benefits of quality original copy. Here goes:

You wrote it first

When you publish original content on a blog, for example, the publication date is attached to that article. Googles little spider is smart enough to figure out you wrote it first, so you get the search engine credit for that content. Which helps you article rank assuming people are searching for related terms in that content.

Don’t copy peoples’ stuff

Remember how in school your teachers used to tell you about plagiarism? Remember how you aren’t allowed to do that? Well, search engines have the same rule. If you copy stuff Google will penalize you for it. Also, just so you know Google can also detect if you changed the content just slightly. Again, no points for you so please be original.

Make content look nice

When I say make content look nice I don’t mean that you should add text that flashes blue and yellow. I mean that the formatting should be done in such a way that helps people reading the content to find what they are looking for.

Keep adding fresh content

You should always add fresh new content that is relevant to the service and or products you provide. Make sure the content answers question your potential client might have. Make sure you are addressing a question you receive often or a known pain-point.

If you have any questions, feel free to email info@georgenicolaou.me